Is this a bug or hardware problem?

[murk]

Since upgrading to 10.1.1, as soon as it was released, I have had trouble with my DVD RAM Drive. Occaisionally I get a message saying the device just removed was not put away properly. It's happened several times when I try ejecting a disk by dragging it to the trash, so I am assuming it is the DVD RAM that causes this problem. It has happened, however, when I am working and not ejecting a disk. Perhaps at these times this happened a while after removing the disk. When it happens I can either get the spinning rainbow disk and everything freezes up; or everything keeps running, but new disks inserted do not show up until I restart. This does not happen every time I eject a disk. I'd say it's happened once or twice a week. Is 10.1.1 the culprit or is my drive going bad? How can I tell which? I tried Drive 10 and it reports no problems with the drive.

[Spheric Harlot]

FWIW, I've had similar problems (losing access or not being able to unmount, etc.) with external FireWire harddrives under X, with similar results - weird hangs and such.

Yesterday, after trying to unmount a FireWire disk that was no longer responding in the Finder, I got a message saying I needed to enter a username and password to make changes to automount.

Seeing as these symptoms appear somewhat similar to those you're experiencing, I'd venture that OS X is indeed the culprit.

And since improved FireWire/USB/various drive support is listed in the changes for 10.1.2, and Apple has publicly acknowledged problems with quality control in their recent updates, I'd guess that they know about it, and they're sufficiently embarrassed.

:)

-chris.